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Criticism versus Libel

Criticism versus Libel

Alan Ackerman

Publisher:

Yale University Press

DOI:10.12987/yale/9780300167122.003.0008

This chapter examines distinctions and connections between defamation and literary criticism. It discusses how questions about deliberate falsehood and damaged reputations alone prove difficult to answer not because it is hard, if not impossible, to pinpoint the author's intentions, but because the intention of the utterance is structurally inseparable from how it is received. The meaning of a defamatory statement is determined from the point of view of the reader. So, in cases of libel, rather than focusing exclusively on the text or attempting to parse the intentions of the author, the Court reads the statement in the way it would have been read by the average person. Under the Court's doctrine, a defendant can be held responsible only if the statement is false and defamatory, the defendant had the requisite state of mind, and it has the requisite effect upon the reader.

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PRINTED FROM YALE SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.yale.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Yale University Press, 2017. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in YSO for personal use (for details see http://www.yale.universitypressscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy).date: 22 February 2018